Knitting on the Cam

Monday, November 19, 2018

I've started with the third ball of yarn, some lovely fuzzy wool that might well be the perfect brown, although one wouldn't know it at first glance.

The bits of green and reddish just make the brown richer and deeper somehow. Too bad I only have this one ball.

The locking markers are just to remind me which is the right side. (Now that I think of it, the one on the finished front piece is to show where the decreases start. I knew I'd kept it there for a reason!)

So this will be a nice warming vest. I think I'll do something different on the back, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

I've been looking for a plain pullover with something interesting on the front.

I seem to keep going back to, "Oh, I'd better just adapt this one and that one and mix in bits of this other."

My main base now is Stephen West's Go To Raglan. Very plain, top-down knitting. I could add any old texture or lace pattern to the front. I even stopped in at a yarn shop this morning and looked at the wall of appropriate wool.

I do have a few things to finish up, of course.

Besides wool, I spotted a few other things on my walk today, including a 51-year-old bit of sidewalk.

Friday, November 16, 2018

Did you know that the actual quote is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." It's from the King James bible. It means, I assume, "Read the fricking pattern before you just keep knitting when it's obvious you are making a mistake, dumbass!"There is, apparently, only one place in the Clapotis pattern where anything at all could go wrong. It says, "k this and foll st tbl." Knit this and following stitch through the back loops. Not "knit 2 together" at all. Actually, what I was doing was slip, slip, knit. In any case, decreasing a stitch. Because I looked at the pattern when I started, and then just, la-de-da, did whatever popped into my head as I went along. I knew I was off, because the dropped stitches and the increases on the other end of the row kept getting out of sync. How could the pattern be wrong when 25,000 people had successfully made this scarf? Am I the only one who noticed this discrepancy in the pattern? Because I surely can't be doing anything wrong....

"This doesn't seem to stretch out as wide as it should." That's because you don't have as many stitches as you used to!
It is still a functional scarf, and so colourful and light and warm. Let's just pretend that I wanted that gentle, asymmetrical decrease.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Sometime in the last month I was walking along Bloor Street past the Gucci shop and Louis Vuitton and other similarly swanky places, and somewhere along there, I took a not-very-good picture of this sweater in a window.

This morning I was at the desk in the Textile Museum and was looking through some booklets that had been donated for the sales. Lots of baby stuff, but then a few sweater booklets from somewhere around 1990, the best time for knitwear! So I amused myself by taking some pictures... Click to embiggen, as we used to say.

All one colour, no-frills shaping, texture....

This one is probably too bulky, and no turtlenecks, please.

Pretty perfect, maybe! All-over simple lace, cardigan.

I'd make this longer, but otherwise, dreamy!

Summer stuff now, but great ideas.

Without the shaped hem, perfect!

Very cool lace.

Oh, Shetland Ragg, my one-time favourite yarn! Now I am too snobby to use anything with that much synthetic in it, but it served me well in the olden days.

This one makes me want to run out, find some ragg yarn and commit to knitting acres of boring stocking stitch.

"Trust me, this is a fine sweater."

After my rummage through the donations, I went to Ravelry and tried to find a pattern (one would hope I'd have something in my library already!) for something to meet my immediate needs. I'll have another look and maybe tomorrow show you actual possibilities for my next big adventure in knitting!

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Our little pool down the corner, where the kids took swimming lessons, is overcrowded with a dozen people swimming lengths. My neighbour and I just went at noon, for our second swim in two or three months, and are now considering the 7 am time slot to avoid the crowds!

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Today I went out to lunch with some friends, had a nice time and a good chat. One of them has recently taken up knitting, and had never been to the yarn shop to beat all yarn shops, Romni Wools.

Since we were nearby, we took a stroll in that direction.

We stopped in at Yarns Untangled on the way, where I was sorely tempted by some gold/yellow stuff, but nothing was perfect. Of course I didn't have my golden coat with me, so that made things more difficult. My friend, however, found the perfect thing... although she hadn't known she needed it before we walked into the store!

We made it to Romni, which, as some of you might know, is gigantic. We lost each other for a bit there, we pawed and sniffed and looked at all sorts of things.

I saw this, and carried it around the store for a good half hour. (The shop is huge, but the lighting is variable, and I wanted to check if this was greenish or goldish.)

Double-knitting weight, a bit tweedy, not too warm, enough in one ball for a hat... Perfect, if I really needed a gold hat. Perhaps, though, I don't. I thought of all the knitting piling up here and had a moment of mature restraint, and didn't buy it. Nor the Silk Garden, nor any soft and squishy Malabrigo.

Sigh.

I carried on to the ribbon store, because I need a bit of rainbow ribbon to hold this on. The season has come for a slightly warm thing to wear over one's shoulders, but it will fall off backwards. Unfortunately the ribbon store didn't have any rainbow ribbon, and I didn't have the piece with me to choose a good colour, so I left there empty-handed as well.

On my way home, I went up a lane and saw this garage door. Or wall. I see a hinge, but I doubt anything opens.